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Wednesday, July 1, 2015

It’s Time For An Anthropological Approach to Safety Culture

One of the holy grails of safety management appears to be
safety culture. Many organizations speak of the need to build a safety culture
in their organizations, or of how the overarching goal of any safety initiative
is to build a culture of safety. There are LinkedIn groups devoted to building
a safety culture and to improving safety culture. It seems that almost everyone
agrees that building a strong safety culture is the goal of our profession.

Now, when you ask people what safety culture is, this where
it starts to get fuzzy. Sometimes you hear people say that it’s how people in
the organization behave in terms of safety, i.e., the decisions they make, the
risks they take, etc. Some people refer to culture as the sum of the habits
people have. Others use that classic definition of “the way things are done
around here”. Some believe safety culture is something you have to create,
whereas others think that every organization has a safety culture, it just has
to be influenced.

Fair enough. How do we build a safety culture or influence a
safety culture to achieve the Valhalla of safety that culture promises to be?
This is where we get even more confusion and disagreement. Sometimes people say
it’s through engagement of workers, or putting up motivational posters (or even
posters of their kids, to motivate them not to kill themselves). Sometimes it’s
engagement of leadership. Maybe it’s training.

Honestly though, when you look at the approach the safety
profession takes toward culture, only one thing seems clear – there is no
clarity.

In the safety profession, if one of our employees faces a
work situation where they lack clarity, where they are uncertain, or where the
way forward is unclear, almost without question we would advise them to get
clarity by going to an expert on that task who can advise them. It’s funny that
most people reading this agree with that strategy, but the safety profession
fails to take its’ own advice! If we really want to know what culture is, why
haven’t we talked with the scientific body that coined the term and whose whole
purpose is to study culture – cultural anthropology?

Now, don’t get us wrong, any anthropologist will be the
first to tell us that they haven’t figured out culture, nor do they have one
universal definition that they agree on either (one definition we like for its
brevity is shared patterns of learned behavior ).
But they at least can tell us where culture comes from, how it affects
individuals, and how it changes. Isn’t that exactly what we’re looking for in
the safety profession?

For example, looking through an anthropological lens,
culture is an adaptation that groups of humans used in order to solve problems
in their environments. Our human ancestors gained an advantage by working
together, which allowed them special access to food, safety, and the ability to
reproduce that those who went alone did not have. Culture helped to keep these
groups together and influenced the behavior of individuals within the group
that helped secure that advantage.

If this is true, there are some general implications. First
off, culture is context specific. Culture developed because it helped people
solve the problems they faced in their environments. This means that a cultural
adaptation is specific to that environment, which may mean that the culture may
not work in another different environment. This leads to the next implication.

Culture is neither good nor bad. There is no universally good
or bad culture. Cultures may be “better” (more specifically, more adaptive)
because they help the members of that culture adapt to their environment more
efficiently. But that same culture may not work in another environment. So you
cannot compare one culture to another without considering their context as
well.

Now this may sound like weird academic speak, but if the
above is true, it has some important implications for the safety profession.
Here’s some we’ve thought of, although there may be more:

All organizations have a culture. It naturally emerges as
groups within the organization adapt to solve the problems they face. So it is
impossible to “create” a culture without considering what culture already
exists.

Perceptions surveys alone are poor measures of culture.
Surveys measure perceptions of individuals at a given time. They strip away
those perceptions from their context, which means you’ve completely lost the
ability to understand culture. Certainly those perceptions are a part of the
culture. But if you stop there then it’s like studying hand clapping by only
looking at one hand.

Comparing cultures using some normative scale makes no
sense. Culture is context specific. So saying that one culture is better than
another only works if both cultures are operating in exactly the same
environment. If not then you’re comparing apples and oranges. Any organization
that compares your culture to someone else’s to tell you which is better is
simply not measuring culture. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that the
comparison is useless, but it does mean we should figure out what we’re
measuring before we change anything.)

To understand the culture, understand the context. One of
the most common forms of research in anthropology is ethnographic research, which
involves observing the culture in its environment. Why don’t we do this in
safety? Why don’t safety professionals and managers who want to understand the
culture get out and see the world as the workers see it? Identify the problems
workers have to solve, the realities they face, and you’re well on your way to
understanding the culture.

If you want to influence a culture for the better, find ways
to help the culture better adapt to its’ environment, i.e., help the culture
more effectively solve the problems and negotiate the tradeoffs. To put it
another way, increase the potential for resilient performance. This could
involve ensuring adequate resources (or that scarce resources are used
properly) or helping individuals identify relevant cues (and disregard
irrelevant cues) to help them make better decisions. Provide more adaptive
capacity to the real and potential problems workers face and you will
facilitate the creation of resilience, which strengthens the culture in that
environment.